Today, April 14, 2017, is the tenth anniversary of the first nationwide day of action on Global Warming. There were, as I recall, thousands of local actions – including South Whidbey. And I want to celebrate with all of you – and say, THANK YOU. My borrowed grandson Toby is typing this for me (fingers too stiff these days which is tough for a writer) but it’s all my own words.

If you could see us now, you’d be so amazed – and proud – of what you did after the jolt of four blackouts in the winter of 2006 woke us up. Of course, Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth that played that fall at the Clyde also helped throw a big bucket of cold water on our old dreams of endless growth.

You sure got busy, and we get the benefit. Let me give you a snapshot of island life, 2017. Now some of it may seem like bad news to you, but really, it’s great!

Starting with those blackouts, people dusted off the old disaster plans from Y2K days and got us all in 20-household neighbor to neighbor clusters. We owe a big debt to the churches that adopted the motto “neighborliness is next to godliness” – whew, they were so organized and so giving. At first we called it “emergency preparedness” but there have been so many emergencies that we’re beyond prepared – we’re just taking care of one another every day. We share tools and recipes and elder-care and bicycles and game nights and book clubs. Each neighborhood has a name (mine’s called Winphia after my dear departed cat and my neighbor’s dog) and we compete on sports days. Lots have bands and singing groups. Mine, of course, is the best. But I digress.

Inspired by the Journalism that Matters Project that Stephen Silha and I have been involved with for the past 7 years, I incorporated a story about journalism into the second edition of The Change Handbook.

Here is that story, excerpted from Chapter 66 — The Emergence of Inspired Organizations and Enlightened Communities. It includes both fact and imagineering. The facts speak to the gatherings we continue to convene and the vision for a new story of journalism that is emerging from them. The imagineering aspect of the story takes a leap, building on some of the most intriguing and playful ideas from the journalists. (How about a street musician singing the daily news?)

But eleven years ago some friends challenged me to write a story of exactly how it would work.

Of course, wise democracy could work in many different ways, and I don’t think of myself as a great story writer, but this vision suddenly came to me and I described it.

Pat & Pat is an imagineering view from 2020 — a futuristic, down-home story about a new, co-intelligent politics. It tells how Patrick and Patricia McFallow become co-mayors of Story City, Iowa, in 2016. During their four-year mayorship they engage thousands of citizens in powerful, empowering conversations about what they want their community to be like and how they can change it. Of course, the community starts changing, brilliantly and fast….

Even though it doesn’t cover the idea of citizen deliberative councils, which surfaced in 2003, I still love it. Some day I’ll revise it, but for now, here it is….

I wrote the short story The Evolving Storycology Project in February 2007 after some prodding about what sorts of outcomes I was hoping for from this conference.

I’ve been thinking about this kind of story field conference for more than a decade — I began writing about story fields in 1993 — and visions of what might be possible have been emerging and mixing in my mind and spirit ever since.

This imagineering story — it reports back to you from 2015 — is nowhere near a complete vision, but it is one coherent one. If we came anywhere near doing what this story describes, I would be totally blown away. I suspect we’ll do a lot that is totally different from what it envisions — and I’ll still be blown away.

But if by any chance this story excites you, let me know. One of the interesting potentials of imagineering stories is using them to network with others who would like to see that particular dream come true….

Flickr Photos

Credits

This conference is being organized with support from the Kellogg Foundation and the Co-Intelligence Institute. Illustration credits: Dana Lynne Andersen, in From Lava to Life: the Universe Tells our Earth Story by Jennifer Morgan -- Courtesy of Dawn Publications